Until this year, I did not realize how many Russian translations of Thomas Moore’s poetry had been produced in the 19th century, especially its first half. For details, I recommend two investigations into the subject (in Russian): Mikhail Alexeyev’s 1982 article in Literary Heritage (Volume 91, Chapter VIII [warning: a large pdf], pp. 657-824), which I have cited before, and Tatyana Yashina’s 2012 book. A summary of Yashina’s dissertation is available free from the Russian State Library.

It turns out that even Mikhail Lermontov, as un-Moorean a poet as a borderline Romantic could possibly be, was familiar with Moore’s poetry, borrowed a few images from it, and even translated onepoem. (At 16: technically, it should be classed with his juvenilia, but he put down some preternaturally mature lines that year, 1830. Having learned some English, Lermontov only read Byron, Moore and Walter Scott in that language, according to a friend.)

Of all those numerous translations, however, very few made it into the Russian canon, or the poetic mainstream – one and a half, as it were. The half refers to Mikhail L. Mikhailov’s 1869 rendering of Peace to the Slumb’rers, a “Catalonian Air.” I don’t doubt the quality of Mikhailov’s poem – he was a gifted translator – and I’m almost certain it influenced the revolutionary dirge genre, but it’s not exactly a well-known piece today.

The one translation that is still remembered is Vecherny Zvon by Ivan I. Kozlov, originally Those Evening Bells (1827), subtitled “Air. – The Bells of St. Petersburg,” first published in 1818. Set to music – presumably by Alexander Alyabyev – it remained a popular song from the 1830s until, I would say, three or four decades ago, when the tradition of family singing seems to have come to an end in Russia. It is part of the standard repertory of Russian choirs, but their audience is not particularly large these days.

Kozlov’s poem sounds so naturally Russian that an anonymous Russian author suggested in 1831 that Kozlov’s version was the original and Moore’s a translation. The claim was not as absurd as it seems today: Kozlov had lived in St. Petersburg since the war of 1812 while Moore was making efforts to follow Russian letters through his Continental friends, primarily Alexander I. Turgenev. Moore’s reading Turgenev’s prose translation of Kozlov’s “air” about the “bells of St. Petersburg” and composing one in imitation of Kozlov for the collection of “national airs” would not have been an impossibility. Of course Moore’s poem predated Kozlov’s so the issue was moot. Moore’s Russian sources, if he used any, remain undiscovered.

This said, Ivan Kozlov’s greatest translation success – arguably – was associated with another Moore, a Scot, and with another graduate of Dublin’s Trinity College. In 1825, Kozlov produced a Russian version of The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna, the poem Charles Wolfe had published in 1817 under his initials, C. W. Somehow they got lost or dropped when it was reprinted in London, unauthorized by the author. To Byron, who reportedly delighted in that “ode” in 1821, it must have been anonymous. However, as Thomas Medwin’s Conversations with Lord Byron appeared in 1824, including Wolfe’s poem in full, and the next year a collection of Wolfe’s poems was printed, Kozlov was probably aware both of the Irish poet’s identity and Byron’s (anecdotal) admiration for it.

(Some might protest that Wolfe, the son of a Church of Ireland clergyman, was not a genuine, echt-Irishman like Moore. On the other hand, that clergyman was the godfather, and possibly the biological father, of Wolfe Tone. Charles Wolfe himself wrote in Patriotism:

O Erin! O my mother! I will love thee!

One is reminded of Mickiewicz’s famous invocation: “Litwo! Ojczyzno moja!”)

Lieutenant-General Sir John Moore was killed in 1809 during a successful rearguard action to load the remnant of his army on belated British ships after an unwinnable campaign against Marshal Soult in Galicia, the north-west of Spain. Kozlov’s version leaves an impression of a tight-knit troop of stoic soldiers burying their noble, fearless “chief” in a foreign land. This could have happened anytime, anyplace: there is no mention of the “Briton.” Rather,

Your lonely bed in a strange land
Was made by kindred hands.

Kozlov’s poem was a major, lasting influence both on first-rate poets (see Lermontov’s 1833-34 description of the burial of a fellow cadet) and on lesser masters, none of whom came close to Kozlov’s masterpiece. By the time he completed it, the poet had been blind for four years.

By a weird bit of serendipity I’ve just come across Pushkin quoting Wolfe’s poem. I was looking through a French translation of Kosta Khetagurov’s “Ossoba”. As you probably know, Khetagurov is regarded as the founder of the Ossetian literary (as opposed to oral) tradition. “Ossoba” is a short account – originally written in Russian – of the old-fashioned Ossetian way of life during the time of Khetagurov’s father, i.e. before the complete Russian takeover of the country and consequent modernisation. To supplement Khetagurov’s essay, the translators have added extracts from books by foreigners who visited Ossetia in the 19th century, including a paragraph from the first chapter of Pushkin’s “Journey to Erzurum”. Pushkin describes seeing an Ossetian funeral with mourners placing the body on a cart and covering it with a “burka” (Caucasian felt cloak). He then quotes Wolfe in English:

Oh, thanks for that Pushkin reference. It’s been so long since I read “The Journey” that I completely forgot this episode. To be precise, the dead man was carried out of the hut on a burka rather than wrapped or covered in it, so the Wolfe quote does not fit to the letter. Pushkin then adds: “Unfortunately, no one could explain these rites to me.”

Nowadays, one can find books on Ossetian burial rituals by Ossetian and Russian ethnographers. It appears that most Ossetians buried their dead in tiny stone huts or caves in the mountains until the early 19th century (e.g., the Dargavs necropolis).

Kozlov turned Wolfe’s “No useless coffin enclosed his breast” into “He lies not in woodboard captivity,” literally – which reminds me of Tolstoy’s description of a Muslim burial in “The Prisoner of the Caucasus.”

Khetagurov gives a long description of Ossetian funeral rites. What interests modern historians is the links these may have with the ancient Scythians. The Ossetians are descended from the Alans, a Sarmatian tribe which was part of the wider Scythian cultural sphere, i.e. steppe nomads who spoke an Iranian language. There are certain parallels between the funeral rites Khetagurov describes and Herodotus’s account of Scythian burials. For instance, both the Ossetians and Scythians engaged in excessive and even violent mourning for the dead; Khetagurov writes of Ossetian women beating their cheeks rhythmically and wailing hysterically and the men flagellating their heads and necks. Scythian horse sacrifice is believed to survive in the ritual of marking a horse as belonging to the dead man by cutting a notch in its ear. Of course, Ossetian culture is not simply a pure continuation of the culture of the ancient and medieval Alans. The Mongol invasions of the steppes and later – and most importantly – the devastation caused by Tamerlane forced the Alans to take refuge in the Caucasian highlands where they adopted some of the customs of their neighbours (and influenced those neighbours in turn, e.g. the Nart sagas). However, since the Ossetians are the last known descendants of Scythian cultures and they still speak an Iranian language they are a fascinating subject of study for historians, ethnographers, mythographers and linguists.